Phil Nash presented his ideas on functional C++ to a packed ACCU meeting a couple of weeks ago. He kindly provided the slides on his website.

For the uninitiated, the functional style is often quite a shock, but having written F# for some time, I’m in favour of “modelling computations as evaluations of expressions” as Phil presented it, or the declarative style as it’s often described. I wrote about Higher-Order Functions in C++ recently and Phil touched on that as well.

One of the highlights of the talk was the section on persistent data structures, which share as much of the previous state as possible whenever additional elements are added. For example, an associative binary tree could have a new element added, but retain links to the bulk of the original tree. There are challenges to stay balanced, but often the benefits can be worth it (e.g. a red-black, persistent tree that’s thread-safe because all the data is immutable). Phil also presented a Trie hybrid with hashing – a persistent tree structure, with performance similar to unordered_map, for which the hashing ensures no re-balancing is required.

The finale was a demonstration of pipelining for C++, based on std::optional (available from C++17). The recommendation was to watch Eric Niebler’s Ranges talk from CppCon 2015 for more details.